Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to image processing and, in particular, the processing of video signals.
Description of Related Art
Terminal devices such as smartphones include cameras that can perform recording of moving images and/or still images. When recording a moving image or still image, the lens of the camera mounted on the terminal device captures an area in front of the lens with a finite angle-of-view. There exist some cameras that can capture images with a wide angle-of-view. For example, there exists a camera that can capture 360-degrees of the surrounding area with respect to the camera. Moreover, there exist cameras with installed video processing programs that can capture a plurality of images in an area surrounding the camera and connect the plurality of images such that a 360-degree panoramic image is obtained. For example, a user may have a terminal device with a camera that performs recording with a 45-degree angle-of-view. In this example, the user may capture eight images, whereby each of the images is captured after rotating the camera approximately 45-degrees such that a combination of the eight images forms a 360-degree panoramic image when the images are connected.
However, with respect to moving image data and related video signals, even if image data is captured by changing a direction of a camera, a 360-degree panoramic image (or size image having an angle-of-view greater than the recording angle-of-view of the camera) cannot be obtained with the moving image data. That is, in the case in which a video signal is captured by rotating a camera, the timings at which the live image data is obtained for each angle at which the camera is rotated will differ and therefore, the images cannot be combined to form a single panoramic image.
To illustrate the above problem by way of example, FIG. 15 illustrates a panoramic image P0, which represents a 360-degree angle-of-view. In this example, angle-of-view F0 represents the angle-of-view in which a camera used in the recording can actually capture an image. If video recording is performed while rotating the camera such that the angle-of-view changes from angle-of-view F1 to angle-of-view F2 to angle-of-view F3, a panoramic video image cannot be formed using the images captured with respect to each angle-of-view (as shown in panoramic images P1, P2, and P3) because live image data does not exist in the surrounding area with respect to each of the angle-of-views. In other words, because live image data can only be captured with respect to the angle-of-view in which the camera is currently facing, panoramic videos cannot be formed for a given time instant by combining a combination of moving image data in the limited angle-of-views because live image data does not exist at the different timings at which the recording was performed.